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This Week's Sermon The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost 15 July 2007 "You Can't Choose Your Neighbors" Luke 10:25-37 LSB Series C Vicar Hans W. Fiene Soli Deo Gloria!

In a moment from what I consider to be The Simpsons best episode ever, the Simpsons are put into the federal witness protection program and are sent to live on a houseboat. When they arrive, Homer makes the comment that living in a houseboat will be great, because if you don't like your neighbors, you can just move. At that point, of course, all the houseboats surrounding that of the Simpsons immediately start up and abandon the area, choosing not to have Homer Simpson as their neighbor.

With houseboats and motor homes, it's pretty easy to choose your neighbor. And if they're willing to put a lot of time and effort and money into it, people living in regular residential homes can probably have some say in who their neighbors are as well. But when it comes to true neighbors-the kind that are defined not be living next to us but simply by being human with us-we don't get a choice. As Christ shows us in today's text, everyone is our neighbor-even those people who we'd never choose to live next door to. And so, because can't choose who we will count as a neighbor and who we won't, we also can't choose that we'll love some people as ourselves but not others.

After confirming with Jesus that, in order to be saved a man must love the Lord with all his heart, soul, mind and strength and love his neighbor as himself, he asks a follow up question. Luke says that this man asked Jesus, "and who is my neighbor?" with the desire of justifying himself. What that means is that the man asked this question wanting an answer that would show him that he could stand before God, righteous and worthy of eternal life. He asked this question expecting Jesus to give him an answer indicating that he'd completely kept God's command to love his neighbor as himself. He wants Jesus to tell him, "well, your neighbors are your friends and family members. They're your fellow Jews who also want to keep God's law, people like that." And he wants Jesus to select those types of people because those are exactly the type of people to whom this lawyer has probably been a very good neighbor. So, in an indirect way, he's actually trying to choose his neighbors here.

But Christ doesn't allow this lawyer to choose his neighbors and walk away from the conversation believing that he's perfectly kept God's law. In fact, Jesus does quite the opposite. By telling this now famous story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus offers what must be to this man painfully wide parameters on who counts as a neighbor.

As most of you probably learned in Sunday school, the Samaritans were seen by the Jews as a kind of inferior, half-breed group of ruffians with whom they were to have no dealings. In short, the relationship between the Jews and Samaritans was not unlike what you'd find today between the Israelis and the Palestinians. And so when Christ uses this Samaritan as an example, He's saying, "your neighbors are even those people who you hate and who hate you. They are people who threaten your children and oppose your way of life. Your neighbors are those who are your greatest enemies. And you are to love them as you would love your own flesh and blood. You are to come to their aid in time of need. You are to serve them in every way you can and you're even required to put yourself below them." In short, Jesus tells this man that your neighbors are precisely the people you would never choose to love as yourself.

Like the man in today's text, it's very easy for us to convince ourselves that we've been great loving, caring compassionate neighbors when we only count as neighbors those people who make it really easy to be loving, caring and compassionate. After all, loving your neighbor as yourself is not a difficult task when your neighbor and yourself get along very well. But Christ teaches us that our neighbors include everyone, even those who offer us nothing and even those who hate us. And so, when we look at how well we've loved those who aren't terribly easy to love, we find ourselves no better off and no more self-justified than the lawyer who questions Christ.

And yet, we still find ourselves attempting to choose our neighbors all the time. Between a close friend and a person who has lied about you and slandered you, who would you go see if both were sick in the hospital? Would you casually walk past the room of the person who's hated you to embrace the person who has loved you? Between your brother and a strung-out junkie, who would you rather welcome into your home? Would you open the door for one and slam it shut in the face of the other? Even in a more corporate sense, if our congregations were to grow, instead of growing through poor, single mothers with wild children, would we rather gain members through relatively well-adjusted and well-behaved families who can put a nice chunk of change in the offering plate? As much as we might want for everyone to hear the Gospel, are there people that we would just prefer hear the Gospel somewhere else? As all of these examples show, it's easy to love our neighbors when they thank us for everything that we've done, when it makes us feel good to be loving and especially when we gain something from them in return.

But you can't choose your neighbors. And when we have both failed to love some people and showered love upon others in order to gain something personal, we have failed to keep God's command and we are no different than the lawyer in today's text who was driven by purely selfish desires-in his case, the selfish desire to earn his own salvation. But Christ is different. Christ didn't serve those who loved Him for His own benefit. Jesus is divine in nature. He didn't need to die for the world in order to become divine. He didn't become our savior because He had an insecure desire to be praised and lauded. No, Christ served everyone-even those who hated him-not for His sake, but for their sake.

Christ is the Good Samaritan. And, in fact, what Christ does for us is even greater than the work of the Good Samaritan. Jesus did more than help those who were near death on the road. Christ came and saved those who were already dead in sin.

As the Samaritans were enemies of the Jews, we were enemies with Christ through sin. Sin established us as contrary to His Father in heaven. The wounds of our selfishness, our greed, our anger, our hatred and hard heartedness revealed us to be below Christ, not worthy of His grace. Through our sins, we hated both our neighbor and Christ. But Christ did not hate us. Like the Samaritan, Christ looked upon us with compassion. And from that compassion, Christ was moved to serve us, even though we were never worthy to be served.

The Samaritan bound the wounds of the man from Jerusalem. But Christ did even more than this. Christ didn't just dress our wounds. He healed them. He healed our wounds by cleansing us from the sin that had caused those wounds in the first place. Christ closed our wounds through the opening of His own, by "being wounded for our transgressions" as the prophet Isaiah states it. Through Christ's death on the Cross, the cause of our death on the road was destroyed. And because of Christ's resurrection, we have been raised out of death into eternal life in Christ.

The Samaritan poured oil and wine on the wounds of the man to cleanse them. And Christ has cleansing oil and wine of His own. Through Holy Baptism, Christ anointed us in the water and the Word. He removed the infection of our sins and wrapped us in the dressing of His righteousness. And in the Lord's Supper, Christ also continues to cleanse us. When we wound again by falling into temptation, Christ's body and blood are poured out upon us. Through the word of forgiveness poured out upon the bread and the wine, our wounds are healed again and we are strengthened to continue living as those who have been brought back to life through Christ our Lord.

After bringing the man to safety, the Samaritan promised the innkeeper that whatever expenses the man from Jerusalem incurred, he himself would pay. Christ has promised us that He has paid all the debts we owed. He has promised us that everything God requires of us has been provided completely by Him. The Samaritan served his enemy so that he might be restored to heath. Christ served his enemies so that we would be restored to God.

While dead in sin on that road, we were enemies of God who hated and reviled Him, who spoke against him in our every action. In short, we were the kind of people that you'd never choose as a neighbor. But out of His great love for us, Christ still came into the flesh. He still made Himself our neighbor and served us. Through both His incarnation and His atonement, Christ did something that we are not capable of doing. He chose his neighbors. And more specifically, He chose all of us to be His neighbors. He chose to love those who could not love Him. He chose to serve those who could not serve Him. And in doing so, He set us free-free from the self-serving bondage of sin, free to love Him and free to love each other just as He has loved us. By choosing to make us His neighbors, Christ made us His brothers. And by making us His brothers, Christ has made us children of God who have been given the right to stand before their father completely justified because of Christ's death and resurrection. By choosing us, Christ has delivered us into His Father's Kingdom, cleansed, healed and forgiven-and free to live in the grace of our redeemer throughout the eternal life that the greatest neighbor won for us.